wellRED podcast - Evening Skews - Week of October 20, 2020

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Me and Smart Mark talk about drinking yourself to death during the debate, all the election fuckery you can stomach (including a conversation with expert Becky Bond about potential election-related SHENANIGANS from Team Trump), and oh so much more on this week's podcast edition of Evening Skews. One love one life let's get together and feel alright, ya know.

And we thank them for sponsoring the show. Well, no, I'll just go ahead. I mean, look, I'm money dumb. Y'all know that. I've been money dumb ever, since ever, my whole life. And the modern world makes it even harder to not be money dumb, in my opinion. Because used to, you, like, had to write down everything you spent or you wouldn't know nothing. But now you got apps and stuff on your phone.

It's just like you can just, it makes it easier to lose count of, well, your count, the count every month, how much you're spending. A lot of people don't even know how much they spend on a per month basis. I'm not going to lie, I can be one of those people. Like, let me ask you right now, skewers out, whatnot, sorry, well-read people, people across the skew universe, I should say. Do you even know how many subscriptions that you actively pay for every month or every year? Do you even know? Do you know how much you spend on takeout or delivery,

getting a paid chauffeur for your chicken low mane? Because that's a thing that we do in this society. Do you know how much you spend on that? It's probably more than you think. But now there's an app designed to help you manage your money better, and it's called Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions,

monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money shows all your expenses in one place, including subscriptions you already forgot about. If you see a subscription, you don't want anymore, Rocket Money will help you cancel it. Their dashboard lays out your whole financial picture, including the due dates for all your bills and the pay days.

In a way that's easier for you to digest, you can even automatically create, custom budgets based on your past spending. Rocket Money's 5 million members have saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscription with members saving up to $740 a year when they use all of the apps. Premium features. I used Rocket Money and realized that I had apparently been paying for two different language learning services that I just wasn't using.

So I was like, I should know Spanish. I'll learn Spanish. and I've just been paying to learn Spanish without practicing any Spanish for, you know, pertinent two years now or something like that. Also, a fun one, I'd said it before, but I got an app, lovely little app where you could, you know,

put your friend's faces onto funny reaction gifts and stuff like that. So obviously I got it so I could put Corey's face on those two, those two like twins from the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland movies. You know, those weren't a little like the Q-ball-looking twin fellas. Yeah, so that was money. What was that in response to? What was that a reply gift for?

Just when I did something stupid. Something fat, I think, and stupid. Something both fat and stupid. But anyway, that was money well spent at first, but then I quit using it and was still paying for it and forgotten. If it wasn't for Rocket Money, I never would have even figured it out. So shout out to them. They help.

If you're money dumb like me, Rocket Money can help. So cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney. dot com slash well read today that's rocket money.com slash well r e d rocketmoney.com slash well read and we thank them for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. They're the. Well, hello there everybody.

Welcome back. Today's Tuesday, October 20th. I'm Trey Crowder and that's Mark Aidy. Howdy Mark? What's up, Trey? Hey, let's take a brief detour. marks in slightly different surroundings you moved right but you moved from one apartment in one in the same building to another apartment in the same building so that's yeah how's that going we moved to a two-bedroom

because this pandemic's going to happen until 2028 so we needed more room yeah needed to pay a little bit more yeah either way I'm glad you're here glad all of y'all are here this is evening skews as always we begin with the daily dumbass and I don't have much of a preamble for you this evening. Let's just get right into it. Here's the clip. Mark, tell me if you can't hear it. I said, First Lady, am I the most handsome president ever? Yes, absolutely.

I said, who could top me? Well, she said, well, JFK was good-looking, but nothing like you. Nothing like you, don't. Okay. Yeah. We all want to fuck Trump, don't we, Mark? You're dying to fuck Trump. Like sitting your eyes.

It's also like, I didn't know we were competing to see who the most fuckable president was. Yeah. I mean, it's really hard to compete with the sex appeal of John Q. John Quincy Adams. I don't really know. Yeah. I mean, FDR was able to pull his cousin and another lady. I mean, this guy's got, I don't know how we got to like the sexiness of the presidents.

Now, so I want to, I want to like, so first of all, I, this. It's just so... It's so wild to me that he believed... I can't understand the brain of him and people like him because I know that he fully believes this. And you can't really tell from just the clip we just played, but the context of this all had to do with his hair specifically, which is, of course, been amazing, you know,

the dawn of Trump time, basically. But that's what got this whole thing started. But I thought, while listening this, and I'm going to run it back just a little bit before it gets up to that point. And, like, this whole thing had sort of... the energy to me of like this sounds like if you close your eyes

this sounds like it was recorded in a like Midwestern comedy club in the 80s or something. The way he sort of handles his crowd and the way they respond to him, I hope this comes across what I'm saying, but listen is why I'll probably a little bit of it that leads up to what we just heard.

I'm thinking about doing that that way, don't have to worry about that. You shaved? No, he shaved it all up. He doesn't have to worry. about, whome. Hmm. How does it look, darling? How does it look, First Lady?

How does it, Darling, you're the most handsome president? I said, First Lady, am I the most... You see what? It sounds like a, it sounds like a fucking, like, road dog act from the boom in the 80s. Like, it really, like, you can hear the mumbling laughter in the crowd, and he's doing this whole like, huh, huh, huh, I said to him, I don't have to worry about...

He takes his hat off, and the whole crowd cheers. He's like, yeah, well, you know, it's like, I don't know. It's just, it's so surreal to me. It's fucking wild. It's also like, it's weird that the Trump's cinematic universe has so many extended characters. And it's like, a regular person watching would make any sense of it. But what he was doing was roasting Ali Vesher and MSNBC correspondent with a shaped head. That's what he was doing. Which is like, the guy has like 200,000 viewers in the afternoon on MSNBC.

Like, who could possibly care about who he is? Or why would your, but all his fans know, but a regular person in the streets, like, I mean, the last two weeks in a presidential campaign, it's like, what's a big issue on your, on your plate average voter as your pocketbook or health care nap? I'm really concerned about Ali Vescher's haircut, you know. Yeah, and also, look, Mark, let's just put it out there. You are a fellow bald. You and Ali Vesher are, you know, on the same way.

Did you take this personally, this attack by Trump going after his bald head? No, I mean, he should shave, except he has all the plastic surgery scars from having 40s. Scout typement. Yeah, I told you, when you first sent this to me, I'd said, like, I brought up the, it sounds like an 80s comedy club room thing, which is funny to me. And that's how I felt about it when I was watching it for the first time. That's how it played out in my brain until it got to the part at the end of the clip we played at the beginning where the crowd starts chanting, we love you, we love you. And then like a chill went down my spine again, as so often happens with Trump clips. It's just so, like, I mean, just cultish, you know.

Oh, like it's just... Yeah. It's... I don't know, then. Roll out the golden cap. Let's cut a version's head off. Let's get to it. Yeah.

Well, you know what? We're two weeks, T minus two weeks, from the biggest election and pretty much any person's living memory. It's wild to me that it's already two weeks left, you know? Like, I've been...

I've been looking forward to this day for, oh, I don't know, four years or whatever now. But at the same time, it's one of those things where, like, it seems like it's been an eternity, but it also feels like it's, you know, snuck up on me, kind of. Like, it's wild to me that it's actually here, basically. But are we going to have, like, blue balls from it, though? Because it won't be like a regular election, right?

Like, how much do you think we're going to know on election night two weeks from now? Well, there's two universes, right? There's the one in which things make sense. And then there's the one we live in where everything goes from Sweden, or what happens, right? So in a real universe where things behave normally, it feels like it should be called pretty quickly on election night. In our universe, where Trump controls the Justice Department

and two major news networks, who knows? Yeah. Okay, but I love... There's a gap in my knowledge here, which is filled with gaps. My knowledge is Swiss cheesy. But you said in a universe it makes sense, we should know election night, like any other election night, what happens. But I don't understand how that is the case.

And there's so many different states doing vote by mail and everything. And I think pretty much all of them, the rule is you have to postmark your vote no later than election day, right? But if you do it on election day, there's like a built-in delay to this. Isn't there? Isn't there a good chance that a lot of states will still be up in the air as of election night? like all bullshit and nonsensical universe considerations aside or should that not happen?

Some of them, my understanding of this is limited, but some of them don't actually open the mailing ballots until the election day or the day after. So even though they have them sitting in a big box somewhere, so I don't really know how that's going to play out. I think Florida and Pennsylvania

would have them counted on election day. But the same rule applied in 2000. And, you know how that went. Yeah. Right. But as has been the case for a long time now, all of the early numbers are encouraging if you are on the leftward side of things politically in this country. One of the headlines I read earlier today has to do with the great state of Texas where everything is bigger. Mark's old stomping grounds.

And apparently, so far as of today. still two weeks removed from election, but already in Texas, the number of early votes that have been passed in the state of Texas as of today is larger than the total number of voters in Texas who voted for Trump in 2016. So there's already been more people who have early voted in the state of Texas as of right now, two weeks out from the election, than were people who voted for Trump in Texas total. in 2016 and of course he won the state then you know I feel like that's encouraging

yeah I mean more people voting is good you know because it tends to be a more representative leftward you know a snapshot of the electorate

right so that's why we like that but you know who doesn't like is the people that run Texas so like statistically Texas is the hardest state to vote in

right a lot of weird shit there well that to me me that's kind of the thing is like the numbers are astronomical even in a state where voter suppression is hardcore you know like you said texas is one of the most stringent states for suppressing votes but yet these numbers are still you know what they are even in that state which i feel like is a good thing it's obviously still bullshit that they suppress the vote the way that they do we talked on

episode a couple weeks ago about the whole thing where the governor limited drop off ballots to one per county, which means even the county that Houston is in, which is the fourth largest city in the U.S., even that entire county has one drop box, so all of the voters. It's like 3 million, 2.5 or 3 million people who have one drop box for their ballots.

But yeah, it's a lot of people. It's a shitload of people. And that's like, that's insane. And also bullshit. It's complete bullshit that, is going on but I'm saying considering that and in spite of that it makes these numbers even more I don't know if impressive is the right word but you know what I'm saying like in that state in particular having these kind of statistics coming out already is a good thing I think if people don't

keep up with this kind of stuff the demographics in Texas have changed drastically in the last decade Texas is now a majority-minority statement to turn that way before 2016. And you know anything about, you know, demographic voting patterns. That should mean Democrats are way more competitive, but probably aren't going to be state legislative races because it's a jury mandate. You're all the hell, so the same with Congress. But in a state race, like governor or president or senator, it should be able to make it a lot closer, provided people are willing to wait in the lines, they're going to require to wait in, which it looks like they kind of are so far. And I don't know, I don't know how it's going to play out, but it, depending on, because the people who run elections are elected by the county.

So it's going to work out weird where Republicans are going to be suppressing votes in a Republican counties. Meanwhile, Democrats who run like Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio and Houston are going to be doing everything they can to make sure people get to exercise their right to vote, which is like, we were talking about this before. It makes me so depressed that, like, one party is fully against voting. And this is how it is, you know, in a two-party state, where it's just full on semi-fascist at this point. Yeah. No, it is. It is where we're at.

But there's other encouraging news, too. And we've got some, you know, some bad news where we're voting in the election is concerned coming up. But first, some more of the good stuff. Another thing that's happening right now is going down in South Carolina, where Lindsey Graham, the infamous Nancy Graham, seem to potentially be in some serious trouble. His Democratic opponent, Jamie Harrison, has been breaking records and campaign fundraise in recent weeks.

It's up near $60 million he's raised in the past couple of weeks, with only two weeks before the election. So there's real momentum here. He letting him out on the street, Mark. man don't let me do this to myself I'll say zero zero yeah I

I yeah hell I'm mad at myself for asking that question because I feel the same like you put a gun to my head and make me pick one I'm going to pick Lindsey Graham winning but it still is encouraging to see Jamie Harrison making the push that he has made so far like

for sure what it comes down to is like with the bowl like there was like 14% I'm decided a couple weeks ago that's last time I saw a poll people don't like Lindsey Graham like it's a fairly universal human quality to not find Lindsay Graham trustworthy or likable which is why he you know dropped out of the Republican presidential

primary polling at like half a percent or whatever the voters in South Carolina don't trust him because he's he's just kind of like a I hate to use this word but a John McCain Mavergey sort of voting record used to be a like out like a softened immigration for example he like the Trump presidency he really wants to keep job, right? So he's completely flip-flopped on a ton of shit. But it doesn't change the fact that

Trump polls like 10% better than Lindsey Graham in South Carolina because he, Republican voters like him more. Now, when they get voting booth and they still, they see an R next to Lindsey Graham and a D next to a black dude, they're going to vote for Lindsey Graham. So that's right. Right. It pulls down too, I feel like, even though they hate it. Yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. the thing I read that said that the turnout and not the turnout but the the numbers

you can expect from either side are pretty inelastic in South Carolina meaning like there's a strong democratic contingent built into the voter base in South Carolina but they but it's a and they turn up they turn up in every elect they turn out in every

election but it's it's not enough to actually win basically and it's like you can get And then even that is like at 40% or something. So if you do everything you can, you can get to like 48 as a Democrat in South Carolina on a statewide level. But that's like the ceiling, according to the polling that I saw. So you have to see like.

That's what I don't know. I hate to be hopeless ever in any of these situations. But that it seems to be the situation there. No, I mean, basically what it boils down to. And Nate Silver, I think, to a long explainer to this, maybe got this the same place. But it's like they have a hard, Democrats have a hard ceiling about 47, 48%. So you can't get to 50. You need like a strong, like if they have like a super Trumpy third party candidate,

drawn like 8 or 10% from Lynn from Graham. Right. That's kind of what's happening in Georgia where this is going to be a runoff to matter what. But it's, yeah, it's just hard to get over 50 as a Democrat in South Carolina. Um, another thing, not that I'm a huge USA Today fan or anything like that, but USA Today I like to stay at the hotels and get big news. Yeah, now get it slid under your door every morning. I know all about it, but USA Today.

But they, uh, for the first time in their history, which apparently only goes back to 1982, which is weird to me because I, I didn't know that. And I, yeah, I was born in 1986. So like, USA Today has always existed and always been kind of ubiquitous when you go and every gas station. hotel you go to and I did not realize that they were that young of a paper or of an institution but apparently they only date back to 1982 but still they've never endorsed the presidential candidate until today when they endorsed Joe Biden they did in 2016 uh put out a piece urging people not to vote for Donald Trump but they still didn't they still didn't endorse Hillary Clinton but today they

endorse Joe Biden um which is like you know what I mean whatever but it's just It's a number of things happening that seem to be in favor of the Democrats in the forthcoming election, is why I mention it. Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know, not quite sure how these things work in probabilities, which is very weird to me. But, like, 538's election forecast has, like, the odds at, like, Joe Biden, 87, 88 percent to win and Trump at 12, which is, like, a pair pocket aces versus a two-seven-off suit. and Texas hold them, right? But two sevens win sometimes. That's true. And it would be,

dude, it would be the most 2020 America thing possible for, you know, them to hit a full house, sevens over twos on the river, basically in this election. Like,

I'm just not, I'm still not comfortable. Like a hurricane, a hurricane hitting Dade County on, like, on election day? Yeah. Yeah, that possibility.

So going back to Texas, we mentioned that the numbers they're encouraging, very encouraging, but, and also, furthermore, Trump pretty much, like, if Texas did happen to flip, it's basically over. Like, I saw, I don't think it was 538. It was some other polling site that runs projections and whatnot, and it ran like 15,000 projections or something. and in 99% of the projections where Trump won, I'm not saying one 99% of the time, I'm saying of all the projections where Trump won, in 99% of those models, he also won Texas. So it's like you've got to have Texas if you're Trump, right?

Like losing Texas but still winning the election is the equivalent of, you know, what Iron Man pulled off in the Avengers going up against Thanos. one in 14 million or whatever it was. Buddy, do you want to talk about some, like, hilariousness? So, like, say, in a way of year, like, this year, say Democrats take the state legislation in Texas,

which I know they're hoping to. So they read gerrymander and rewrite election law to make it easier to vote. And Texas flips blue. It's going to flip blue eventually because, like I said, the demographic trends. White people are dying off and Latinos are coming in, right? So the minute that flips, you're going to see

Ted Cruz for a Boston Electoral College so fucking fast, your head's going to flip. And it's going to scramble everything because if Democrats are winning Florida, California, Texas, and New York, that's basically, you just need like two other medium-sized states to get a 1070 electoral votes. It's going to be a, it's going to scramble shit. So I'm not sure what they're going to. Again, they could try adopting popular policy positions. They could try that. They could try that.

They're not going on. Right. Right, but that goes back to what we're saying earlier about Texas's enhanced voter suppression methods that they're employing, right? Why don't you talk about a couple of those? Like, we already talked about the drop boxes. There's also, it was just ruled they can reject mailing ballots or over signatures being wrong or something like that. Yeah, so some states have signature match, which Texas does, which is ridiculous because I don't even know. we don't we don't teach cursive in schools anymore.

I don't know where people are getting your signatures. That actually is not true, Mark. This is related to nothing, except you just brought up cursive. Blue my fucking mind. I've got a third grader here in the Southern California public school system, and he's having to learn cursive, which I...

Wow. I know. When I saw it on the syllabus at the first year, because they sent all this stuff out, because it's like distance learning, it's online elementary school because of COVID. They sent all that out. And the teachers,

teacher actually put in parentheses beside the area where it said, you know, cursive on Wednesdays or whatever, she put in parentheses, yes, we teach cursive in third grade. And because you could tell they've gotten a million questions for parents. Like, y'all really make them learn cursive, but apparently they still do, which I think is the dumbest fucking thing ever, but, you know, whatever. We got voice to text. I know, dude, it's so, so dumb. Like, we grew up in a time where, like,

every everybody learned. Cursive was a whole thing. You had to learn it. It would ever matter, you know, for you? Like, who gets a fuck about cursive? It's one step removed from calligraphy, which is now art form, basically. It's not a thing anybody takes seriously.

It's so dumb. You got your third grader has learned cursive so you can sit by a campfire with a cool pen and write a love letter home during the war. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Anyway, but I digress.

My signature doesn't match anything, right? Like, it's different every time, basically. There are a few things that say the same. I know I'm not going to demonstrate it for you guys because apparently it's still determined the course of my life, even at a point where I found everything with pen numbers. But, yeah, so Texas has signature match. But what a lot of states will do is if your ballots rejected be a signature match, they will, like, let you know that you can come back and fix it, right,

to prove you are a fact of you and you did want to vote this way. So what a federal court ruled is like Texas can reject ballots for signatures not matching, which I bet is going to be much more strict, much more strict that if your signature is, looks as opposed to Jeffrey, right? And then you don't get any like opportunity to fix it. So they can throw your ballot in the trash and not tell you they did it. That's what the federal appeals court, three Republican judges, two appointed by Bush, one by Trump. I think so.

Do you know if most of the voters in Texas when the signature comes into play, is it digital? Is it one of those little stylus pins on a digital screen version of signatures? Do you know if that's the case? I understand. It's on bail-in ballots.

Okay. All right. So it's handwritten. All right. Well, it's still fucked up, but I've just, if it was that version of it, like, that,

everybody who's ever done one of those digital signatures using a stylus at the grocery store or whatever knows that that shit is completely unusable for the most part. Like it just looks ridiculous. But if you're talking about mail-in ballots, people sitting in home, they're doing it with a pen.

That's at least better than that. But that's still stupid, though. Yeah. So now it's not just Texas. Of course it's not. There's a fuckery going on in Pennsylvania and Florida, all kinds of important states.

Apparently, in Florida, there was just some big Russian hacking operation that happened with voters there or something like that. What's to do with that? Don't know who did it. So there's a lot of trolling and weird black hatch on the internet. People do joker shit because I think it's funny. So I don't accuse anyone to doing it. But a bunch of voter information was hacked from Florida. Apparently data game in 2018.

and we dropped it on a Russian message board, right? Which would be a really funny thing to do if you're a whole right now to make the lips go crazy. But it's a lot of like people's, the main concern here is one voter intimidation. We'll get that in a second because people are getting weird emails. But basically your name, address, your party affiliation, all that stuff. The computer doesn't track who you vote for because you have secret ballot in America. But identity is going to be really bad for identity. if that is 15 million, only 13.5 million people registered to vote in Florida in

2018. So this might be some duplicates in this data, but it's basically everybody had their information stolen. And the upshot, this might be a coincidence or might be from the same data leak, but registered Democrats are getting threatening emails in Florida from a dummy email addresses that purport to be from the proud boys. Let me read this for you. Roxanne, we're in possession of all your information, email address, telephone. You're currently registered. Democrat and we know this because we obtained access to the entire voting infrastructure. You will vote for Trump on election day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to the Republican to let us know you received our message

and will comply. We will know which candidate you voted for. I would take this seriously if I read it. No. You know? Well, I want to, my, like, my knee-jerk reaction is to tell people who get emails like that to, you know, to say, fuck them mentally and go vote, you know, in response. just to that if for nothing else like

I know if I got that that would be my reaction fuck y'all you ain't going to do shit because I think it's extremely unlikely that they are going to do shit but at the same time you know if they actually did if you're a 45 year old single woman living in Florida and you get

that message and and then you go out and vote for Biden anyway and then the proud boys show up at your door that's obviously a nightmare but I just don't it's super fucked up but to me, in my mind, it's the same as receiving one of those like Nigerian prince emails. You know what I mean?

Those scam emails where it's like, send me your bank account and we'll make $2 million together because I'm a prince of Nigeria and everybody knows about that. The ones that get the ones that, you know, that they send to Maimaws all the time or whatever. This is the equivalent of that during the election. I firmly believe that. But at the same time, you know, it's fucked up that it happens and it's also easy for me to say. But it... Yeah. Yeah.

It should make you want to vote even more, in my opinion. The fact that they so clearly don't want you to should encourage you to do it even more because that means that they're scared. You know, they're scared of what's going to happen if you do vote, which is all the more reason to do it. Yeah, but that's the redneck in your trade. I know.

A shotgun and a can of beans in my trailer ready with a go bag, ready to go off the grid. but these are a right yes this is fake this isn't from the proud boys I would I bet a lot of money it's not the proud boys and again they have no way to know how you actually voted so they're lying in the email

but the Bush v. the Bush Gore election was decided by 500 votes in Florida so if this works in a couple hundred people it could be a big difference yeah absolutely and I guess what I'm trying to say is like I like I could easily sit here and go on a whole diet tribe about fuck them they're all cowards anyway they ain't gonna do shit fucking go

shove it in their face and do what you need to do anyway. But I don't, I don't, I'm not going to shit talk somebody who is actually intimidated by something. It's what makes it so fucked up in the first place. It works on 200 people. That could be the difference. And that's fucking scary, you know, like they're really pulling out all the stops with, with this election, playing every car, every voter suppression card they have.

And again, every single one of them has to do with suppressing the vote. which could not send a more clear signal that the more people that vote, the worse it is for them, which shows you how much actual support they have in this country and they know it, in my opinion. But what am I think of how brazen this is? Because unless you're some expert hacker, like tracking this stuff is really straightforward and easy,

for IP addresses and stuff. So whoever did this is going to get caught, probably. And the FBI are still cops, but they're institutionalists and this kind of stuff would drive the, you flip them the bird like this, we'd piss them off. So they're basically counting on Trump making sure the Justice Department doesn't come after them for this shit. Because, I mean, I've had to guess who this is. It's probably some college Republican operation run by some Rodgstone acolyte, right? He's down there in Florida, talking to college Republicans a lot. So maybe one of them will make their name, be the next Roger Stone's in 21,

year old kid who smoked cigars going to Florida State. Hey, speaking of smoking cigars, we didn't have this on the outline, but let's talk about it just briefly here. Turns out Rush Limbaugh's about to die from lung cancer. Pop bottles, everybody, I don't give a fuck. It's true. He's a very loud and proud cigar smoker. I'm sitting here hitting my vape, far be it for me to be a hypocrite. But I'm never going to go on the air and tell people that smoking isn't bad for you. Secondhand smoke is the danger. of second-hand smoke is bullshit and really it's just fine and it's no worse than

it's no more dangerous than eating carrots. All of those things are real things that Rush Limbaugh said in the past about smoking and now he's got stage 4 lung cancer and has admitted himself that he's going to die from it soon. So that's cool.

Yeah, I wasn't, I didn't stretch it because I didn't know we're going to dance in his grave on this but uh... Yeah, I know. We hadn't even planned to talk about it, but you said that and it got my brain in that mode. I just wanted to bring it up. Fuck Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, probably no single person, him or Duke Gingrich probably is more responsible for a woman than that motherfucker.

So I will try not to disappoint my mom, but publicly gloating over the deaths of people, no matter how bad they are. But I will not pretend to shut a tear. Let's put that way. Right. Okay, so moving on here. There's ostensibly one presidential debate left. It's actually Thursday, and I believe it starts at 6th Pacific, so our start time will be fine. We'll do a pregame for it like we did last time. If it happens, because it turns out the people that run the debates, the debate commission, they actually do know about the technological capability of muting someone's microphone. because they have come out and announced that in the next debate, whoever is not being formally addressed at that time, whichever candidate is not being formally addressed with a question at that time, their microphone will be muted until it's their turn.

And as you can imagine, Trump is not into that at all. He has been ranting and raving about how unfair this is, not just this. He's also been going after the moderator for this debate. He's doing everything he can to undermine the legitimacy of this debate before it happens, which is just part for the course for him. But some people think that that indicates that he will end up pulling out of it entirely and won't even go forward with it. And so what are you think is going to end up happening with this?

The big commission did find awesome work wrong because the idea was like they didn't want the moderator to have to press mute. So it's going to be a clock. It's just a clock, right? It's like a shock, a play clock in full. football or shot clock and basketball, you just, you get your two minutes, and then the mic goes off. And you can't argue with the, you can't argue with the digital clock. So, but it isn't funny, he's definitely going to keep yelling.

He'll probably bring his own megaphone to be hitting under his desk or some shit. I don't, I mean, if I was advising his campaign, I'd be like, you have to do the debate. You're down a bunch. It's his last chance to address, like, the entire country in this capacity in that way prior to the election. Yeah. Yeah. If you can believe the poll, he's down 10%. 40 million people have already voted.

Those are going to skew more democratic because of mail-in voting. Only, what, like 130 million people voted last election? So already like a third of that turnout. So, like, you've got to, like, you've got to do the debate and hope Biden literally has a stroke in the middle of it. Because that's like your only hope, you know. He pulls out. He doesn't like looking weak.

So maybe that would be why he'd pull out because it's more important than actually trying to win. but yeah you think the chance is he'll walk over in the general vicinity of Biden's mic and just scream towards it like you know it's going to drive him insane

not being able to talk like we're gonna if nothing else we're going to get a shitload of memes out of this I feel like Trump's body language while he's being forced to be silent or even if he's yelling is not being heard yeah it's going to be internet comedy

gold because by because Ben's been hold up all week during debate prep memorizing his answers to get him under two minutes. And Trump's not exactly, how do I put this? A disciplined communicator, right? That two minute limit, he might be in the middle of his second sentence at two minutes. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, well, dude, you know, two minutes goes back quickly. Apparently also five months goes back quickly because that's how long it's been since there was any stimulus relief from the pandemic. I didn't do them. I actually didn't even do the math. I just acted like I did, and I said five months, but it was in March, right? It's been five or six months since anything actually got done. Yeah. They've been arguing over the next version of it for weeks, months now, and they continue to argue today was a self-imposed deadline that Nancy Pelosi set

and basically said, if by today we don't have an agreement on the table, then it ain't going to happen prior to the election, which is not necessarily the case. That could be a political bluff that she's made. but either way, who the fuck knows when any actual relief is going to come from the government on this? And of course, fuck Turtle in chief, Mitch McConnell is doing everything he can to prevent it from happening, actively campaigning for the Republicans in the Senate to not work on the stimulus because, according to him, it could upset the Supreme Court process or whatever the fuck.

It's complete bullshit. but these numbers they're arguing over are like they're so large it's almost it's almost like made up the difference between the two right because it's like 2.2 million versus one or trillion 2.2 trillion versus 1.8 trillion or something like that the differences between the numbers but they have all these other like smaller disagreements within the larger bill that they just can't come together on. I'm going to say something I've never actually said in my life before, but good job Nancy Pelosi, because here's the difference in these bills, right? This is from the Americans for tax fairness, because it's not just, like you said, it's not just the amount of the bill, but what they're going to spend it on.

And basically, the public just want to spend it on normal shit you'd think, you know, corporate giveaways. Tax cuts, corporate, yes, protecting businesses and corporations, protect from liability with sick, sick employees, stuff like that. So here's, here. So the Heroes Act, which is the Democratic version versus the Heels Act, which is the Republicans, right? Dem version would repeal the $135 billion tax giveaway to millionaires. Senator Republicans would keep it. The Dem bill extends unemployment insurance at $600 per week. Republican bill reduces it to $200 a week.

Dem bill provides $900 billion for state and local governments. Republicans none. Dem's $117 billion in additional support to Medicaid. Republicans none. Dems $13 an hour hazard pay for central workers and comparison of that like Trace said the Senate version gives corporate immunity to code a coronavirus lawsuits There's a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures versus none 3.6 billion for election assistance versus none and then

They did for some reason the Republican version also must have got Social Security Medicare because they can throw it in there So this is a this was a poison pillow bill, they never wanted to pass it. They didn't want to pass anything. They wanted people to say the $1.8 trillion number to make it sound like it's close. Right. And it's not close. Right. Right. And the

money for state and local governments on the Democrat side, which on the Republican side is zero, because the Republicans call that, that's what they refer to as the blue state bailout, which like, it's so wild to me, because they're effectively just saying, like, hey, fuck those people.

You know what I mean? Like, even within cities in your own state or whatever, they're just outright saying, if you live in a city, you deserve to die from this, or you deserve to not be assisted from it. And they just wear that shit on their sleeve, and everybody's just completely,

actually frame it when they talk about it, but that's what they're saying. It's crazy to me how on board they, They all are with the eye of the other side suffering, you know, like when we're all Americans. That's the liberal authoritarian is they just want to see other people hurt. But it's not even really like, like, for better or for worse, California and places in California, New York and, you know, Oregon, Washington or half-state income taxes. They have their own money, right? A state like Louisiana or Texas doesn't.

They're hugely relying on the federal government for all their funding. Yeah, right. So, like, California, not people around the country know this, but when the unemployment bonuses ran out, California extended it on their own. They reduced $300 because it's what the state could afford and now it's ran out. But, like, they were able to pay people unemployment themselves. Texas could never do that. They mean, they wouldn't do it, but they also couldn't. So it doesn't even make sense.

But can you imagine, like, shoe on the other foot, like anybody on the left talking about, I mean, you'll see pure dipshits make, jokes about flyover country, but you would never hear someone say, like, the Trump's like California's going to hell. Can you imagine, you know, like, pick somebody on the left, Ocasio-Cortez being like, Tennessee should burn in hell.

Can you... Right. No, dude, yeah. You're 100% correct. Like, yeah, it would never play with it. Well, I mean, fuck, man. That's kind of what the basket full of deplorables situation was, right?

was like that version of what we're talking about. Hillary said that and it like sank her immediately, but yet they just out front completely on Main Street. You're like, no, fuck California. Fuck the liberal cities and all this stuff. As we have pointed out before on the show, there's millions of people in California who love Trump, who are hardcore Republicans, you know,

roughly 40% of them probably are on their side. and I don't understand how that doesn't infuriate those people. You know, if you're a Trump-loving Californian, and again, they are legion, they are outnumbered by liberal Californians, but there's still a shitload of Trump-loving Californians. And if you're one of those people, I don't understand how you reconcile his obvious disdain for the entire state.

they just rejected any kind of federal assistance related to the wildfires that happened in the entire state of California including all the rural areas or whatever I don't understand how that doesn't drive you fucking crazy

if you're on that side of it but I don't know they seem unaffected by it yeah the only way I can think about it is like they hate they hear it as bad mouthing like Southern California in the Bay Area, which they also hate too, you know, so.

Right, but it affects the entire state that you also live in, you know? I know, I know, I know you know, Mark, but I'm just saying as fucking as it. You convinced me, Trey. I know, it's, it's crazy. Speaking of crazy, the Brianna Taylor

travesty continues to unfold. Apparently, and you actually, fuck it, you just tell us the situation, Mark, so I don't butcher it. So grand jury is a secret, but I was supposed to be secret, but one of them followed a lawsuit to be able to tell her side of the story because she felt the attorney general misrepresented what happened in the grand jury. And she won her lawsuit.

She was joined with another grand juror, also felt dupes. But basically what she's saying is what the AG said was complete bullshit, that the grand jury was given a very narrow scope and wasn't allowed to consider charges against the other. police officers or any other charges at all. Let me just, so grand juries are in paneled for a duration of time, and they hear multiple cases. So you need to have that because she has a reference of being in a grand jury for a bunch of other cases

and also this one, right? So she knows what it was supposed to look like. And here's what she says. Being one of the jurors of the Bria Taylor case with a learning experience, three weeks of service leading up to that presentation showed how the grand jury normally operates. Brianna Taylor case was quite different. After hearing the Attorney General Daniel Cameron's press conference and with my duty as a grand juror being over, my duty as a citizen-

compelled action. The grand jury was not presented any charges other than the three-one endangerment charges against Detective Henrikinsen. The grand jury did not have homicide offenses explained to him. Grand jury never heard anything about those laws. Self-defense or justification was never explained on. And as a lot of it goes on, but basically everything that he told us happened in the grand jury was a bullshit.

Yeah. So that last. Right. That last thing you said, everything he said happened in the grand jury process is absolutely bullshit. That's the problem with it, right? Because, like, to me, I feel like the expectation should for everyone that a grand jury, they rule based on what is put in front of them. Like, that's how, of course, a grand jury can't, like, they can't press their charges or they can't, you know, rule on the legitimacy of things that are not brought before. for them. The problem here is that this guy, this guy presented it as though that had happened, as though they had been given all these additional charges and declined to, to prosecute them or to indict. They declined to indict them, but that is not what happened. They were only given a very

limited set of charges that they did indict upon. And that's, that's the problem. Yeah, and I'm not a lawyer. So I don't know, I don't know maybe if they had a better understand. They could have filed their own trial. I don't know how the process works, but nobody on the grand jury was a lawyer, and here's how she just bribes it. Questions were asked about additional charges, and the grand jury was told there would be no, because the prosecutors didn't feel they could make them sticks. The prosecutor handheld them to around the question, just indicting on the charges they gave on. Right. Well, see, well, okay, but see, to me, that, like, that is what you would expect to happen. to me, the way you just outlined it,

where they're like, oh, we couldn't, I don't, you shouldn't expect a grand jury to just like, know the circumstances of the whole thing and point out to the prosecutors, hey, aren't you missing some stuff here? Like, that, of course they don't do that. Like, you put something in front of them with a set of facts and they decide based on that one thing,

which is what they did. But then later, this dude came out and made it sound as though they were presented multiple different sets of facts with charges and opted to not indict, you know, a certain number of them, which is not what happened. Those things never got brought before them in the first place, right? I'm not a lawyer either, but isn't that how it goes? There you go. Sorry, I'm back.

My technical difficulties. Yeah. You have a correct as per my understanding. Like they didn't, they basically prosecutors like everybody who's watched a law and like a law and orders for the expression on a prosecutor can bet a ham sandwich, right? So like the idea of telling a jury up front that you shouldn't indict someone and tells you what the prosecutor prefer to happen because they just listen to the prosecutor.

Right. All right. Well, hey, let's go to the, let's go the comments over here. see what everybody's talking about. I don't know what this means, Mark. I'm only putting up here because you're from Texas, so maybe you do know what it means. Kim Kobel claims that actually the lieutenant governor

has all the power in Texas. Do you know what Kim's referring to there? Yeah, so Texas has a vestige of reconstruction. So after the Civil War, this is my understanding of what happened. The Yankees, as it were, had the power to install governors in the South. So what they did was the worth of the state constitution

where the lieutenant governor oversees the legislature and has a lot of power. And basically all the governor, the main thing the governor does is oversee executions. So, yeah, she's right. The lieutenant governor in Texas is very powerful. Michael Gojer, goger. In a comment replying to himself says,

after 2016, I don't trust polls. And Michael, I don't think anybody can blame you. I mean, I don't either. I'm very, very gun-shy after 2016. I'm hesitant to declare anything a done deal after what happened. But I also think that this is a good thing. The fact that you feel that way and the fact that I feel that way and the fact that a lot of other people in the left feel that way is a good thing

because it leads directly to all this. crazy turnout and everything that we were talking about earlier, you know? Yeah, I mean, really voting is an irrational act, so you shouldn't, I mean, like, you know, everybody knows one vote probably doesn't, like, you vote as a block or you don't vote at all, or your vote doesn't matter at all, because that's how coalitions and whatnot work. So, like, the voting is an individual sort of, you know, as an individual is like, like, a holy act, like a duty to democracy, like a civic duty, but you shouldn't, it shouldn't effect whether you vote or not anyway because you're won votes unlikely to do anything so like really

no one should ever listen to polls you should go vote as an expression of your citizenship and uh as an obligation yep uh from youtube satori mystic says you can't reason a person out of a position that they did not use reason to get in the first place and stupidity is unrecognizable to those putting it into action And I think you're 100% correct. This is the whole, it catch 22, right? It's a classic 22 argument. Like, the only way for someone to be crazy is if they do not realize they are crazy.

And stupidity applies the same way, right? Like, you can't, you can't reason with a lot of these people because they're not, you're not starting from the same place, right? Like, the only reason they, the only reason they're in a position for you to argue with them in the first place is because they're stupid. they're not all stupid. Some of them are very smart, and the smart ones are way more nefarious. But the stupid ones, the only reason they're in that position to begin with is because they're stupid. And that is the same reason you will not be able to actually affect them or change their minds.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't fall into the trap of assuming all, like, for example, that all white supremacists are stupid because they read a lot of books. They're just like the wrong books. And like Stephen Miller and Richard Spencer both were. They were friends at Duke and they graduated from Duke, which is a. good school. So, yeah, but in general, yeah, you're right. No one knows if they're crazy, which makes me laugh. Because as far as I know, we're not doing this right now.

I could be talking to a mirror in a mental hospital. How do I know? Keith Edward Barry says ham salad is fucking great. I'm with you, Keith. I'm with you on that. Don't know where that came from, but I'm all about it, buddy. I love ham salad. Braden Wells says, talk about Marquita Bradshaw.

Marquita Bradshaw. I was running for Senate and my beloved Tennessee. And I'm, you know, hopeful for her chances. I'm, you know, I'm a Tennessee guy. So the same thing with, I'm a Tennessee liberal. So the same thing applies with politics and football, which means I get hopeful every time and usually end up disappointed and let down and furious at the end of the day. So we'll see what happens.

But I like Marquita and I do. I am hopeful for her chances and we'll, you know, we'll see what happens. Do you know anything about her, Mark? Or is this the first time you've heard of her? No, I just Googled her in polls, and I won't bring me out. You won't tell you. Yeah, I know. I know.

Well, but she already had a big upset victory in the primary over James McClure, who was kind of the establishment candidate. And look, I'm just there now. I like James McClure. I did some events for James McClure. I know him personally. He is a good dude. But I love Marquita, too.

But Marquita came out of nowhere and sort of defeated him and got some hype around her or whatnot. But that don't make... None of the races are looking good in my home state. I'm so jealous of the states that seem to be in play, like South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, because Tennessee seems to be just flying straight down that dumb-ass fairway, man, that hardcore conservative party line.

Yeah. It just is what it is. Yeah. Sam Martin says, can we get the podcast form of the show put up sooner? It's hard for me to catch it live. Yeah, Sam. that's on me. We should. Obviously, I can't, I combine, for people that don't know, the podcast form of the show,

I combine both episodes into one week, right? So it's the week of whatever. So I can't put it up before Thursday night. But what usually ends up happening because I'm a sack of shit is it doesn't go up until like Monday because I forget that I didn't do it until it's too late. And all I can say is, Sam, I will endeavor to do better. because yeah it should be it should go up earlier so i will try to do better on that um n m from youtube says they make cannabis carts for that jewel now i know they do as i've said

before on here that would y'all don't want i can't imagine if we started the show at five and this had can and this had weed in it and i was sitting here smoking it like y'all would see the paramedics show up by the end of the show like i i would be it incomplete, just fatal position, crying, just communing with the void. I can't, I can't handle that level of weed. I can't. Probably weed. It should be legal.

Of course. I just can't. I just have a low tolerance. We've talked about when we had Noel before and she said, she was running for State House in Tennessee and said that every question, the main question she got from all voters is about legalizing weed. And then I'm realizing, like, inevitably, all of our comments lead us back to talking about weed.

I'm just sitting here thinking, why won't anybody run an illegal housing? He win like 80 to 20. I know. No, dude, no, you're right. Like, why don't, especially Democrats, they do that. It's like the most obvious cart to which you should hit your horse, right? If you're a Democrat, because what you're saying is 100% true, I don't get why they don't do that. Like, still, what, because even, you know, as we talked about before, I've talked to,

I have interviewed the Republican state-level congressman who authored a medical marijuana bill in Tennessee. I've interviewed those guys, and they both said that their actual constituents, rural Republican Tennesseans, they have no opposition to a marijuana bill. Like, opposition basically doesn't exist to legalizing weed anymore. There's people that don't give a fuck, and then there's people who are for it. it's the easiest possible ball for Democrats to pick up and run with and I will never understand why they don't do it

it makes no fucking sense to me I mean I can hypothesize none of them will be pleasant but yeah all right school tardy from YouTube says Mark you know everything you really are smart Mark

and I don't know exactly when this comment got posted but I bet it was after the previous comment about the lieutenant governor in Texas it's because I thought a similar thing to school tardy here when it first got brought up. Like, I don't think you've ever been stumped on here, Mark. You keep trying to act like you're not smart, Mark. But every single episode, something comes up and I'm like,

Mark, do you know what this is? Because I don't, because I'm done. And every single time you're like, yeah, I know exactly what they're referring to. And let me break it down for you on a case by, on a bullet point basis. That particular thing, that particular thing I knew because I moved to Texas in 2000, right before George W. was elected president. And I remember reading up on what, like, his actual accomplishments were, and it was nothing. And I was like, you guys, this guy isn't even a real governor.

You're going to make him president? It was very weird. He's like, he's just doing ribbon cuttings. And, like, they made a big deal about him executing that woman, because the first woman executed a while. He had that awful gap. It was with Tucker Carlson. Tucker, when Tucker Carlson was middle of the road mainstream. Oh.

Do you remember this anecdote, Trey? No, no, I just, I meant just that because he used to be, you're right. Like, it's wild because people forget that, but he used to be more like middle of the road or whatever. He was the decent, he was the original conservative, like, compassionate conservative type dude.

And so when he did this interview with George W. About like, George W., they were about to execute this woman. So if you had something you could say to Carla Tucker, I think was her name or something, what would you say? And what do you think she would say to you? And he goes, oh, please help me.

He made fun of her begging him to not kill us. and it was a it was a controversy for like a day and a half and then he killed her and then no one gave a shit it was like somebody on death row what do you think she would say if she could i don't know probably oh please don't kill me or root of all these people i don't want to die making the jerk off motion while he's doing i don't know probably please don't execute me and also the dynamic of it was um she She, all these like 700 club type Republicans, because she had gone hardcore Christian right. They were coming to beg for her life because she had found Jesus.

And he told the right to fuck off so he could kill her. It was a truly weird thing. Yeah. Well, uh, from YouTube, Henderson team loan says, will y'all be on election night? Push Lee's. I'm assuming that's supposed to be Poolees. Yeah. Yeah, of course we will.

It's a Tuesday. So you know, we'll be here each and every Tuesday and Thursday. We will be here live on election night. we were talking earlier before we went live on this episode about what we should do on election night and it's only two weeks away and we still don't know that's how we operate here at the skews but we will definitely be here and we're going to try to do a whole we're going to try to do a like live running update type of thing mark pointed out that when we go live is right when a lot of polls close on the east coast and everything so hopefully there'll be some good shit coming in

that we could talk about um so we're going to try to yeah like basically live stream it and just ride with it and see what happens. But we will absolutely be here without a doubt. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know if I'm sure anything to be called yet. I do remember so my election night 2016 story was, have I told this on the show yet, Terry? It was opening night to Lakers.

And so I got on the train, the North Hollywood train station to go down to Staples Center. And by the time I got off the train, which must have been about 630, all hell was breaking loose because they were, but they called Florida. So theoretically, we couldn't.

know something by the end of the show, but we'll basically be filmed at dead time between polls, clothes, and when we know anything. Yeah. This is a take. I did not see coming, frankly. Harper Hudson's Trey, I love you guys, but take it back about cursive

writing. Take back what you said about cursive writing. I will not, Harper. I refuse to take it back. If you appreciate the beauty of cursive writing and choose later to focus upon it as an artistic endeavor, then I support you fully. But people should not be, children should not be forced to learn that archaic,

fancy-ass bullshit that don't amount to nothing. I'm sorry. I don't get it. Typing. Typing. Yeah, right. Yes, they don't. We make our boys do typing stuff.

And I'm sure, I don't know, maybe they just haven't got to it yet. I'm sure they have, like, typing courses now. Because honestly, hell, I remember taking typing courses in rural Tennessee. when I was in elementary school. But my sons haven't been given typing courses yet other than the ones we make them take, but they have been given cursive courses. And yeah, that's ridiculous.

Like, typing is far more relevant to all of their lives. So, I don't know. Sure is pretty, though. I chose, typing was given an elective in our school, and I chose to take band over typing. And here's the thing, so I write for a living in theory, and I still hunt and peck.

And I also can't play yak-a-sac-saxecks for shit. so I don't know what they're going back to NM, the commenter from earlier, talking about weed. I said I have a low tolerance. NM's trying to encourage me. He says everybody starts with a low tolerance. You've got to push through that, man. And I appreciate your encouragement, but I just don't think I can, I don't know that I'm up to it.

Let's see here. What else do we got? Randy Albright says, I love to smoke weed. There again, you can always count on Randy, dude. I can't, God damn it, I can't, what did Randy say? A different Randy said something in one of our recent episodes and I was like, that is so Randy. And I can't remember what it was, but, but this is also so Randy.

Just a classic Randy comment. I love to smoke weed. I know you do, Randy. You didn't even have to say it. Rule of thumb, if you want to buy some dirt weed or find somebody who buy a 16 year old's beer, go find a Randy. Find a Randy. That's right.

Randy should have their own app, man. and randy at. We chase down. You need a weed dealer. Somebody do some drywall. You know? It's a pass rabbit slash Uber Ead slash Instacart. Forget over.

Show you some dirtweed. Bring us some Miller High Life and do some drywall. Yeah. Yeah. The official app of Randy's everywhere. That's what they're neat. Oh, man. God damn.

Oh, let's see if I can find one more for us to end on. looking through this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This ain't it, but I want to put this up here. Bridget Furman says, his ex-head writer corrupted Tucker. I don't believe that. Tucker's complacent in it. Fuck Tucker Carlson.

I'm not going off-put his accountability on his head writer. He knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. He from Bay Area went to private schools. He's aired to the Swanson Chicken Fortune, the frozen dinner fortune. like he's not he comes to his white nationalism from a very brainyac cynical place he like he's not worried about it his job going an immigrant he's just he's just he fell into being a nazi because that's

what got him more money yep all right well i want to close on this i'm sorry to put you on the spot mark but this is what i want to do sarah marie says mark tell us what you think about newt and i assume they meet newt gangrich maybe there's a newt jenkins or something out there that i'm not aware of, but presumably, tell us what you think about Newt Gingrich, Mark. Well, I presume this is because earlier I said either Rush Limbaal or him is the most responsible for where we're at in the country right now. Yes. So they wrote to winning the house and the contract with America.

They shut down the government over a spending bill, which is why the only reason Bill Clinton meant Montevilow Lewinsky is because everyone, nobody who was paid to go to work. They had interns doing like White House jobs, right? He drug us down in this culture war bullshit. Like they were doing congressional hearings about whether Hillary Clinton had been to foster killed. Republican Party's dissent in this dystopian fucking conspiracy cult started in the 90s. And he was the leader of the party. And also you can't find a better guy than somebody who would leave his second wife when she got diagnosed with cancer for his third wife.

Just all around is lovely dude who post pictures. the most heavily face-tuned Instagram pictures I've ever seen in my entire life and makes him look like a 34-year-old lady and

just a great guy. Well, there you have it. Smart Mark's opinion on Newt Gingrich. All right. Well, thank you all very much. We'll be back in 48 short hours

to pre-game the final presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. We'll see you here on Thursday evening. That's it for the skee. Love you, bye.

We've been live for a little bit now Mark I was just trying to be purposefully awkward hey everybody what's up welcome back today's Thursday October 22nd I'm Trey Crowder that's Mark agey what's up Mark what's up Trey oh nothing this here is evening skews as always we begin with the daily dumbass and tonight's honor is a little different than in weeks past it's a little more nebulous a little less specific tonight's daily dumbass is anyone who engages in a presidential debate drinking game on this evening. Now why do I say that? Because in my opinion, unless your aspirations include

pissing yourself or possibly ending up in a coma, I don't know why you would subject yourself to such an endeavor. Here's the rules from just one of the presidential debate drinking games I found. This one's from the Washingtonian mark, and I'm not even going to read them all. I'm just going to give you some of them. This is some of their rules. You drink when Trump does any of the following. Interrupts Joe Biden, boast about his personal victory over the coronavirus, brings up Hunter Biden, fails to denounce any of the following, conspiracy theorists, white supremacist, armed militias, anti-maskers, dictators, totalitarians, murderers, or tax dodgers, or lies. And now to their credit, the Washingtonian gives a disclaimer here that says,

warning, this is the advanced version. If you're going to drink every time Trump lies, side effects may include headache, dizziness. slurred speech, nausea, vomiting, and potentially death. They also say you can drink when Joe Biden does any of the following. Starts a sentence with the word, look, brings up Donald Trump's tax returns, uses any of the following phrases, systemic racism, police reform, or Black Lives Matter as buzzwords, hymns and hauls about his actual climate change plan, or calls Trump any Joe Biden insult, for example, clown, joker, full of malarkey, or anything too.

that effect. So, yeah, I just feel like, again, you know, look, me and you, we're both drinkers. I know your tolerance is legendary amongst people who know you. You know, I went to college. I had my time in the spotlight, but I just don't know why you'd subject yourself to something like this, Mark. Like, because it's 2020 and we all want to die. Right. But like, I mean, we're joking about it. We're laughing about it. But like being literal, though, based on those rules, as they have been laid out because I didn't even finish it,

but there's also you drink when either one of the candidates says the United States of America fails to answer the question as posed to them, changes direction mid-sentence, and there's so many more we haven't even named.

They've got whole times when you're supposed to take a shot, even we haven't even gotten into. I literally don't know how human being could survive these parameters with these candidates. Yeah. it's like

we're trying to merge the two things that are destroying America which is like addiction to opioids and alcohol and politics so it's just fucking hold it. Well, on the one hand I feel it's like

you know, if you're going to be watching the presidential debate you might as well be drinking while you're doing it you know, that type of thing but on the other hand it's just like I said

there are no rules you can devise that like work but also keep you from murdering yourself with booze before the night is over. So it's just an unwinnable thing. We've got a couple other,

I don't want to call them honorable mentions, because some of these are way worse than that one, which is why we led with that one, because it's hopefully a little sillier and more lighthearted. But we've got a couple other daily dumb-ass nominees for y'all tonight. One of them is none other than the hero of 9-11 himself, Mr. Rudy Giuliani, who has found himself in the crosshairs,

one of the last sets of crosshairs you ever want to be in as a public figure, the crosshairs of Sasha Baron Cohen, Borat 2, comes out tomorrow, and apparently Rudy Giuliani plays a significant role in it. Mark, won't you tell us how that pans out, apparently? Okay, Mark is gone. I don't know what happened there. I'll tell you guys about it. He's got the link he can join us again.

I hope y'all can still hear me. I'm going to go ahead and tell you right now. I know y'all are tired of these fucking technical difficulties just as much as I am. I don't know what the issue is, but either way, hopefully Mark will be back shortly. But as far as I can tell, I'm still live, but I can't see the chat from you guys either. So hopefully if you're out there, they'll pop up here in a minute. And I will just continue alone for a second and hope that Mark shows back up. And I'm not just hollering into the ether.

I'm looking at my phone seeing if I have anything from Mark. There he is. Hey, buddy. Hey, buddy. Hey, what I missed? No, me just flailing, me flailing trying to recover. But I was telling them, I can't see the, I also, I'm not getting the chat over here either. And I'm wondering if I, can you check the, this is embarrassing, everybody.

But can you, is it possible for you to check and see if you can see if we're still going on one? Yeah, yeah. Like on Facebook or something? We're getting chatting at, I've been seeing comments. Okay, so we are getting comments. Well, just so you all know, and I hope this changes. but for some reason I can't, they're not showing up to me,

and I have no idea why. But anyway, Mark, will you talk about Rudy Giuliani and Borat for a minute? All right, so back in July, Giuliani apparently got duped into doing an interview with a Russian media outlet, which was an actress playing Borat's daughter. The character in the movie is 15 years old.

It's not clear if he knew that in this. But anyway, so when they're doing the interview, she starts rubbing his knee and suggests to go the other room and have a drink, which he does because these guys are terminally horny even though they're 85 fucking years old. So they, so he's taking the microphone off

and this is just a description from the video because the movie comes out tomorrow which we are already excited, very excited to watch. So there are pictures of still frames of him laying down the bed with his hand down his pants. He says he was just untouched, he was tucking his shirt back in and taking the microphone off.

Now I've worked in television for a while and out. You don't typically have to lay down on a bed to take a microphone. him pack off. So he, anyway, Borat bursts in the room, the other story,

the people have seen the movie say happens, and the joke is, he goes, no, she's too old for you, she's 15, all right? Yeah.

He starts offering up his own body in exchange for hers instead, so he's offering his sexual favors for Rudy Di Niani, who's hurriedly fleeing the room, right?

Of course, the actresses of age, so nothing untoward happened, legally speaking, what he thought was going on is different. Anyway, it's all very embarrassing. And he's, by the way, I just went through it with his third divorce because he got caught cheating on his wife

with a married woman. And the way he got caught was his name was in the newspaper defending her daughter in court in Florida for car insurance fraud. So these guys just can't stop cheating, bro. Yeah, there's the picture right there. There he is. Look at it.

And I know that's gross. And I apologize. But there you have it. him laid out on the bad hand in his pants. Yeah, nothing untoward happening there. Apparently, yes, Borat Bursan saying, she's too old for you. Please take my un-noose instead.

I spent many years in prison. I know mouth tricks. I can do or whatever. And that's like, that's the joke of it, which is hilarious. But also, the other thing is, correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, what Rudy Giuliani has said about this since it's come out.

He's like, he's tried to spin it as being, I don't know if proud of himself is the right. He's like, he said this guy has, oh, it's hilarious, right? Classic borough. He's gotten all people and he got me to. What are you going to do as though it's like just, you know, like he was on punked or something with Ashton Cudcher? Yeah. Yeah. The point of part was, so when this happened back in July, he called the cops on Cohen.

I'm not sure trying to frame him for stat story rape I'm not sure what the charge was but he called the cops from Cohen and then they gave these crowing interviews where he bragged about

how Borat had gotten so many other people but he was too smart for it which is like Julianel wasn't volunteering to talk to anybody without double checking who they are he couldn't have gotten got this way because

he's the president's personal lawyer and cybersecurity advisor you're right I gave him way too much credit. It's actually way worse than I described it because he tried to say this guy has gotten a lot of people, but he didn't get me

trying to act like because when Borat burst in the room screaming about how Rudy Giuliani should fuck him in the butt and all this stuff, he was wise to it then, which makes him smarter than all these other people and he deserves credit. That's the angle he's

taking. If you're a regular person out there in his street, like the whole reason Borat, I'm assuming, brought a fake daughter into this movie so he won't so he can run pranks without being recognized right the same way a a question used other actors or punk so there's no nothing bad about a regular person getting fooled when you're probably the person you can't recognize no harm no foul but again he was the mayor of new york during 9-11 he was a former federal prosecutor and he's the president's personal lawyer and he's just constantly getting tricked by dumb shit it's like the highest level

our government of our government is that he's constantly getting baba booed in 2020 and And this is the same day that it came out that this dude, and was it Sweden or Denmark, hacked Trump's Twitter. He's like, he's a white hat hacker, so he's trying to do benevolent security checks. But he's able to hack it just because Trump's Twitter password was MAGA 2020 exclamation point, right? Now, a personal bad intention gets in there and announces were nukeing China,

bad shit could happen, right? So. Right. No, yeah, no. I mean, yes. And also, Kerman from, that, the guy who, who hacked Trump's Twitter account, who again hacked it by guessing the password, which was MAGA 2020 with an exclamation point.

Yeah. That same guy had hacked Trump's Twitter account before in 2016, at which time his password was, you're fired, all one word, all lowercase, no numbers, no special characters. That's apparently all true, right? Like that all, like, as far as we know, that all actually happened, that is fucking. absurd because like to me that indicates that he has to be

refusing to listen to the IT people that work in the White House and work for his administration. You know what I mean? Because that shouldn't be allowed to happen and the only way it could happen is if he says no fuck y'all I don't give a shit, right? Otherwise I don't understand how that's even possible.

If you remember early on in the trouble administration the first press secretary, Sean Spicer, that's the name. Dance with the Stars dip shit. He kept actually tweeting out his password and he was trying to log into his account. And it was all like he was all like super hard to generate code like a bunch of like random numbers and letters as any sort of like high high quality code should be. But the trumps is just words.

Like at least Spicer was trying to have some some operational security. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Mark, what are you doing? What are we doing this on right now on your end? Your cell phone or what? know it fucked up earlier.

So we just moved apart and AT&T fucking sucks and they get her internet hooked up. So I was tethered to my iPad using data, but I ran out on my data limit on my iPad so now I'm on my cell phone. So I hope that's working. Well, it is working, but do you have a pair of headphones or something like that you can put in, plug into your cell phone so you can hear me and I won't hear myself? But I admire your, you know, persistence there in making it work. Once again, sorry for all this bullshit, everybody.

And it's not just tonight, as you know, if you've been watching us for a while, we run into this shit fairly often, embarrassingly often. But, you know, it's just part of the having a, doing a live show from your houses, I suppose. But anyway, so let's talk about the big thing going on tonight, obviously. The final presidential debate, if you could call it that, who knows what's going to happen. Now, I said last time after the first debate, the next show we had after that. The show before the first debate,

I was very vocally saying, fuck everybody that acts like Joe Biden shouldn't debate this guy. You can't do that. You can't show weakness like that. You've got to debate this guy. And then the debate happened. And in the next episode, after the debate, I, you know, admitted that I was wrong.

There's nothing to be gained from debating this motherfucker given the way he operates, right? Which I still believe to be. true, but at the very least, we know that the debate commission has instituted new rules where they actually can and will mute the participants when it's not their turn to talk. So ostensibly, Trump should be muted when, you know, the onus is not on him tonight. Now, who knows how he'll actually handle that, which is one of the things many people are going to be, you know, tuning in to see how it turns out.

but you would think that even just with that one little adjustment, hopefully it won't be quite the shit show that it was last time, but I don't know how anyone could be optimistic, you know, given how it played out. I mean, he's definitely going to wander over to Biden's microphone and start yelling into it. Right, no, but like, I mean, are you being literal, though? Because, like, it wouldn't surprise me if he did that, right?

Like, he might actually do that. He's the most predictable. He's just a dumb animal of impulses, right? Yeah. So he's extremely predictable. If he doesn't keep yelling even when his microphone's off, because it's supposed to be on a time limit, right? It's not the setup?

Yeah. He's supposed to time out when his time's up. He's not like that. No, of course. We already doesn't like it. I mean, he's already bitched about it so much, but as far as we know, we're still going to show up and do the thing.

And I don't know. I know we've said many times on here before about how we both pretty much agree. that debates are essentially meaningless in the actual, you know, as far as the impact they have on elections, which I think is true. But still, they happen. They got a lot of eyes on them. So I feel like they do matter in some sense. And I'm just wondering, generally speaking, again, given the like unprecedented and unmitigated shit show that was the first debate, like, what are your genuine expectations for tonight and how it's going to go.

This is Trump's last shot to, in this kind of forum, before the actual election. Like, what the fuck is going to happen? Um, well, so he appears to be getting, uh, rat fucking blue balls because this Hunter Biden story's not taken off in the mainstream press the way he really needs.

Like, I'm not sure if it's mainstream media learned from 2016, not just to uncritically cover every one of his like, guttural, utter, you know, like verbal diaries, but or whether he'd be people just got bored with him. He's not good for ratings anymore. But um, so he's having trouble getting any traction with this stupid. I'm maybe sure it's about Ukraine or China or both anymore. But uh, whatever with Hunter's laptop and his cell phones and shit.

Um, this is his last opportunity to try to get mainstream coverage of that. He's bringing a hunter business associate who's disgruntled to the, um, to the debate. He saved a special chair for him like he did. Bill Clinton's alleged sexual harassment victims or assault victims in 2016. Right. And so that's going to be the main thing he's going to try to do, I guess, is try to force people to talk about that. Good luck. People seem really bored with it. Okay. On that exact point, like, I read a BuzzFeed News article earlier that I actually

thought was interesting that has to do with exactly what you just said. You said, Much like he did in 2016, he's going to pull a similar type of stunt tonight and hope that it, like, moves the needle. But good luck to you because that isn't working anymore or whatever. 50 million people have already voted. Right. Well, yes. But beyond that, the idea that, like, in 2016, Trump in the debates, now I hated every minute of it, but he made a lot of his biggest, like, Trump moments in the debates because he said and. did shit that no one else would because everyone else is a functioning, you know,

politician on some level, but that's not the point. That's when he gained his sort of reputation as, you know, he tells it like it is. He ain't like the rest of them. He'll shake things up. He, you know, he fucking, he puts truth out there. That whole thing, that came from him in the debate saying this insane shit no one else would ever say, right? I feel like. But, like, he, he's played that card, you know? Like, and now he's been the guy in charge for four years and everybody's

it's... It's also... It's the same magic trick, but with much lower stakes and less illusion, right? So it's like Bill Clinton was credibly accused of a shit ton of weird sex stuff and sex crimes and inappropriate behavior, right?

That's... Bill Clinton was the president. Bill Clinton was going to be living in the White House of Hillary I I mean, probably not, but their marriage is their business, right? But so, um, uh, but Hunter is like there's the president's son that's already like a lesser degree of thing. And what he's accused of isn't like any sort of a careerific sex crime. It's like, uh, using his dad's name to get some startup capital from China for some sort

of like defense company that doesn't make any sense. And like that guy, I watched the video of that, uh, a Bolinsky guy or whatever his name is, who's the disgruntled business partner who's beef with Hunter. by the way is that Hunter cut him out of the business not that he did that Hunt they said that Hunter was doing something immoral it's that Hunter didn't give him his cut so it all seems it's all very hard to follow and and I'm not quite sure why it's supposed to matter and in this context like if you want to look I'm super open to the idea that Paul like the intersection of politics and business is super

corrupt and these guys shouldn't be trading on their positions for favors and whatnot that's fine Trump just isn't the guy to make that argument just like Hillary wasn't the person to make that argument in 2016. And the only person to really make that argument is Bernie, and he lost badly. Right. Trump's been on a warpath outside of just from the debate. Obviously, everybody's seen this week.

He's been in a real tiff with Leslie Stahl from 60 Minutes, saying that it was completely unfair the way he was treated during his White House 60 Minutes interview earlier this week, set to air this Sunday. He spent a couple of days threatening to release the full video himself to prove just how badly mistreated he had been by Leslie Stahl. And then he did that. He posted on his Facebook the full video of the interview he did with Leslie Stahl and the caption said, look how rude and biased and unfair this interview was. and then when you watch it

it's just a journalist asking him like actual questions about stuff that he of course is infuriated by and he spends the whole time arguing that like you wouldn't you wouldn't ask Joe Biden questions like this

you wouldn't treat Joe Biden like this when she hadn't even interviewed Joe Biden yet and I don't know this is another one of those things where like I saw this and to me in my mind I'm like oh my God this is going to backfire brutally because this doesn't play the way they think this plays.

But then I think, no, probably not. Like, this is how it plays to me. Like, I can't imagine what they think this gets across, but you get on, like, conservative Twitter and see their responses to it all, and they're talking about how unprofessional stall is and about how she tried to, like, corner him and this stuff. And they're totally going along with his narrative the whole time. And, I mean, of course they're doing that, but it's still, I don't know.

It's another example of one of those things. It's so wild to me how differently something can appear to a person in the same country depending upon what side of the spectrum they fall upon or how indoctrinated they are, however you want to put it, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's like one of the side effect of like the way we do politics in this country as a spectator sport, like everyone falls into two categories. You're either a pundit or a flat.

So either you're trying to spin or you're trying to hypothesize what a third, what another person thinks about something, right? It's like, like, we're all trying to get, oh, this isn't going to play well. People say stuff like that or like, or they're doing the talking points. And my thing is like, what do you actually think about it, right? What is your actual opinion on this? I'm always curious because no one actually says that anymore. And I try to watch the clips. I try to put myself in their mindset because I kind of really couldn't see what his complaint was.

And I know. how is it going to be um like how is it work to be like i'm the most powerful ban on the world and my argument for keeping my job is uh that everyone's mean to me and i feel bad i know right i know that's it like i don't yeah that too i don't understand how that plays like how because they they're supposed to like him because he's like i don't he's tough and he says the shit no one else will say two people's face because he don't give a fuck, you know, or whatever. But then he just sits there and complains about being treated unfairly by this female

journalist. And that's, and he's the leader of the free world ostensibly. Like, you should be able to answer tough questions. But I don't know, man. It's one of those things I can't even wrap my head around it. Moving on, a couple other things to cover here. Amy Coney Barrett, her nomination was approved by the appropriate Senate committee today.

In spite of a Democrat boycott, every Democratic member of this Senate committee did not show up to the hearing for the vote, which, according to the bylaws or whatever the fucking word is, according to the rules they have for themselves, should have meant that no vote was possible.

but Lindsey Graham did what every Republican has done for the past four years as far as I can tell and just said, fuck what the rules say, I'm just going to do this anyway and it will never matter and I guarantee you he's correct and it won't because that's what he just held the vote

anyway even though again that's not supposed to be possible according to their own laws or their own rules and they approved her nomination and now she goes before the Senate next week. So you can say whatever you want about like what the Democratic

are doing to try to push back against the Amy Coney Barrett thing, you know, given how all the shit went with Merrick Garland and all that. But all that aside, like they have actual codified rules and regulations that they should have to follow because otherwise, what even is the government, you know, if they don't actually have to abide by any of their own rules? And this is the latest in an endlessly long line of them that have been. utterly disregarded by the Republicans in power just to accomplish what they want to accomplish. And it won't matter. It won't matter. Like, no matter who wins, this won't matter. All the other times,

they just, like, disregarded what the actual rules say. It won't ever matter. But I don't know. Like I said, what even are laws, Mark? Well, this does not be construed as a defense of Lindsey Graham, but I'll always say this. like we should always remember that senate rules aren't lost they're like roberts rules of orders type shit they they set a certain way and they can always be changed and we go through these debates like about we're going to have it next year about the filibuster right filibuster is not the constitution it didn't exist until like the 1840s or 50s when uh and people it's really only been used in defense of slavery and to stop civil rights act and then we uh then we stops um like like then we

stopped even making people actually get up in filibuster and now they can just like put holds on bills since you get 60 votes it's like okay if you want to if you want to stop a bill you should have to stand up there fish your pants like her forefathers did right you shouldn't be able to just like anonymously it's all very um it doesn't work and i'm saying like just remember that these rules are totally arbitrary they're not they're not on stone tablets they're they're made up fairly recently and they can always be changed and uh the the filibuster and the blue slip rule of all that anti-democratic, lowercase the Democratic, anti-democratic shit, and all go away

and everything will probably work better. All right, well, speaking of shitheads in the Senate, um, we had a request from Natalie Morrow Michael, Nick, Natalie Morrow Nichols on Twitter to discuss Mitch McConnell's

hands, which I'm more than happy to do. Um, bring this up for you guys real quick. I'm, I don't, I didn't, I was not aware of this. I actually saw this before Natalie brought it up, but I only saw it like earlier today, like a couple hours before.

And prior to that, I did not know. So I'm wondering if you guys know or not what is going on with Mitch McConnell's hands. Here they are. Do you guys see that? Those are Mitch McConnell's hands. Yeah. What is that about? Some nurse was saying

it looks like he's on blood thinners and it is a really hard blood draw maybe. So they've had to stick him in a bunch of times. But his lips look like shit too. I think that's probably me of the blood thinner

stuff too. He's got weird stuff. Yeah, it just makes him seem more like a, you know, like a flesh gollum that was assembled and animated

by the plutocrat puppeteers to do their will or something to me. And like they need to, you know, upgrade the model because it's falling apart.

That's what I think when I see. I mean, we get, like Mitch McConnell's never lose an election. He's only going away when he dies,

right? So like we all we all know that. So like one side of effect, and we get called, I know I've been called A just on this show, but so I'm going to point out that like, our gerontocracy leads us to having to do criminology type stuff. We're trying to guess that they help, like the health conditions of our leaders because we don't actually know what's wrong. But they all have, they're all obviously failed. Trump was Trump was in the intensive care, Chris, Chris, like all these people.

And it's just like, we don't know anything. The outcomes of our democracy are going to be determined by, uh, whether 86-year-olds can hang on. Yeah, all right. Let's see. One other thing before we get to our guest tonight, we do have a guest tonight, given that that process works,

who knows, given the rest of our technical difficulty so far, but hopefully we should have a guest tonight who we would get to in just a moment. But before that, I wanted to note that Barry O, Barack Obama went in on Trump again in a speech yesterday, and he really laid it all out there on the line.

It's almost like a lot of people felt like, not that this was the purpose of it, but that it would serve the purpose of baiting Trump into a you know, tirade in opposition to Obama. And I don't know how well that works, but either way, I just, I liked a lot of what

Obama had to say. I particularly liked the part of the speech where he played the, can you imagine if Obama did that game while being Obama? He said, listen, can you imagine if I had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election,

You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that. They would have called me Beijing Barry. And he made a lot of other, you know, great, in my opinion, points talking about how you can have a Thanksgiving free of existential terror or hopefully fights among your family with Trump out of the way. He just scalded Trump for whatever, 40 straight minutes or however long it was, which I for one appreciate. And I just wanted to give it a shout out.

yeah it's some good lines in there he's just a better speaker than anybody else in your current public stage outside of maybe aOC so it's good to have somebody as an attack dog who can deliver a punchline yeah absolutely um all right well so we'll get into the subject and hope our uh i'm gonna be on the lookout for our guests to show up hoping that the link works and all the shit works um oh look here we go okay nice So we got it's been a while since we had a guest. I'm going to be honest with you guys. It's because I was afraid because I'm the producer slash host and the technical stuff gets in my way sometimes. But I'm excited to have another guest tonight. She is the co-author of the paper, The Count, a practical guide to defending the Constitution in a contested 2020 election. And that's what we're going to talk about tonight. But aside from that, Becky Bond is a veteran of multiple political.

campaigns, including Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. She's the executive director of the Real Justice Pack and the co-author of Rules for Revolutionaries, How Big Organizing Changes Everything. So with that, please welcome to the skews Becky Bond. Hey, Becky, can you hear us? Hey, yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Right home. Well, I'm glad you're here. Yeah, we've had some technical issues tonight, so I'm glad everything is working. Thanks for joining us. So yeah, the election's right around the corner. I know a lot of people, myself included, have been terrified that there's going to be some kind of, for lack of a better word, shenanigans from the Trump administration, some sort of attempt to nefariously steal this election by whatever means possible.

And I know you have thought and written a lot about this, so I wanted to ask you what you think the likelihood of that happening actually is. and further what can actually be done about it. Well, I mean, it's not a surprise that you were afraid of this happening because, you know, Trump and his allies they've been talking about all the time. At the R. Screen on Steve Bannon's show, I mean, who has more listeners than you do, unfortunately. We've been talking about this for months. And, you know, we're days away from the most important election of our lifetimes. And if everyone's able to vote and every vote's counted,

Donald Trump's going to lose this election. According to the polls, he's going to lose both the popular vote, and he's going to lose the electoral college, possibly by big margins. But in a close election, it's really probable that he is going to try and overturn the results of the election by disrupting the counting of the votes at the electoral college and at the ballot boxes in the key counties in the swing states.

I mean, he said he wouldn't accept the results of the election if he loses, and I think we need to take his word for that. right i mean yeah why wouldn't you take his word well well actually that's kind of a trick question because there's a million reasons why you shouldn't take his word but when it comes to something like this i agree with you we should probably take his word for it um but what are the actual mechanisms by which he could successfully do something like that because i'm not going to lie about my own ignorance like i'm worried about it because the way he talks about it and i'm also worried because like me and Mark were just talking about before you joined the GOP's proclivity to just ignore whatever

rules exist while doing whatever they want to do. But what can he like actually do, you know, to stick this election or attempt to do so? Well, it's actually quite simple. I mean, part of the issue is we don't have like one election that's run by the federal government. We have thousands of elections that are run by twice, right? So there's like a million ways that we have, that we have problems with every election, right, when it comes up. Like ballots get lost, machines don't work, co-workers don't show up with the polls. You know what I mean?

People who inspect vote by mail ballots, they think the signature on the envelope doesn't match some signature that they're looking at on the computer. There's lots of ways that this can go sideways in any kind of election. We always had this good faith system where the person with the left votes concedes

to the person with more votes at the end of the day, even though we know there are going to be some things that are going to be a little bit messed up. But we're seeing this crazy situation this year where most Democrats are voting by mail and massive number of people are voting by mail because of the pandemic, right? Right. And on election day in swing states, most of the election day vote is going to be probably topped off by Republican voters who tend to vote on election day.

So we're going to have what they're calling the red mirage. It may look like in the count on election day, right, that Trump is ahead in some of these key swing states. But in reality, he's just going to be a. ahead in the votes that have been already counted. And the Republicans, why we know they want to mess with this is Republicans have really pushed back on states like Pennsylvania. And you've asked, can we please start counting the vote by mail ballots before election day,

right? So we can have a result, not weeks after election day, but on election day. And Republicans are saying, no, no, no, no, no, you can't count the ballots before election day. Meanwhile, Trump and Steve Bannon and others, they're talking every day about how that Trump's going win the game day verb and any ballot that comes in after election day is fraudulent. So think about this, right? Pennsylvania, they normally vote just on election day. You have to have a really good excuse not to vote. Because of the pandemic, they've had to print millions of mail ballots,

which they've never processed before. They had to buy new machines. Can the counties run these machines? It's going to be interesting to see what happens. So you can see a scenario where Trump happens to be ahead of the count on election day. And there are all these massive Biden votes piling up at the county election centers at the post office. I mean, Trump's already shown they to use the post office to mess with the vote. You can just have federal agents seize the votes at the post office in Philadelphia and say, hey, these are fraudulent votes. We're going to destroy them, right?

And just make it impossible even to count all the votes. And that's just one crazy way that Trump can intervene in the process. Okay. Well, I'm not going to lie. You're terrifying me so far, but that's okay. I believe, though, you also have, there are some mechanisms by which, you know, we can fight back, right? There's some, some hope, something we can do. Why don't you talk about, won't you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. Yeah. So, here's the thing, is that, this is crazy. Like, I've been working in elections for 20 years, and I didn't even know some of the things about how the electoral college works. Like, I actually thought the electoral college was a place where the election was a place where the went to vote, but college is like some archaic order that just means like a group of people for a percol that have a common purpose. But anyway, so what happens on Election Day is that we vote for electors that will be assigned

to the candidate that we voted for, right? And then these electors, they actually have to be certified by the governor of the state before December 8th, which is this safe harbor date. And on December 8th, the governor will say, here are the electors for our state. and then these electors are going to cast their ballots for the candidate, you know, that they're assigned to. But it's not when the electors vote that actually decides who's the president. The elector's vote, and then the results of that vote gets sent to Congress. And it's actually not until January 6th when Congress sort of certifies, you know, the vote of the electoral college

or they decide, you know, to certify a different side of electlers. They can do almost anything they want. And because of norms, because of precedent, they've always just endorsed the electorate sent by the governors. So here's what people can do. First of all, in a close election, in the swing states especially, if Trump declares himself the winner on election night, even though the ballots haven't been counted, one thing people can do, first of all, is we need people to get into the streets and show that public opinion.

You know what I mean? Like recognizes that Trump is trying to steal the election and that when the votes are counted, that Joe Biden would be the president. The second thing that we can do is we can get our elected officials to go out and say, hey, Joe Biden won the election because a lot of what pushes courts and pushes public sentiment is this movie that you're watching in the news about what's actually happening. And so pushing your Democratic elected officials to say, hey, based on the early vote counts by party, we know Joe Biden won this election.

And when every vote is counted, he'll be the president of the United States. And the third really important thing that we can do, especially if we're in story, state is push those Democratic governors to push forward the Biden state of electors. They can name the electors, even if Republicans prevent them from counting all the votes, right? If the Republicans cheat and take the votes off the table, the Democratic governors of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, they can send the Democratic electors, no matter what anybody else does to Congress. And then we've all got to be full court press on Congress in advance of January 6th to make sure that the House and the Democrats and the Senate

do their job and don't let Mike Pence and Donald Trump still the election. I've been, I beg, yeah, Mark, nice to meet. I've been listening to this great podcast, I'm really enjoying called Fiasco. It's about the 2000 recount in Florida. And even though I was alive and I was an adult then, like I'd forgotten a lot of like small details. And like what you're saying about how like there's so many, like stress points and flaws in the system because it runs so many elections in so many different ways, but it's almost like,

If any election is close, you're never really going to know. And the Republicans kind of had, to my mind, the sort of the correct takeaway in 2000 in Florida. It was like, if we're never going to know what the actual vote total is, might as well try to steal it, right? So it's like, there's like, I mean, like you're talking about the vote tally's like, about how like only one team stood up with this game. Like they, they organized paid protest riots to disrupt counting.

The Gore campaign was pressured to not object to patently legal ballots. They were received from overseas. They were passed. Like, they don't really, in normal times, before counting all the votes, don't really care about minor technicalities, about when stuff's, when the stamp, the Dayton time stamps applied. But like, these are, they called the military ballots. They could get them in, but it was, they're both votes that came in, like, four or five days, a week late.

They all got counted because they lost, all those stuff was decided in the news way more and it was decided the courts or in the accounting rooms. And it was just, anyway, I recommend the podcast, but it's like there's so many points where things can go wrong. And it's just like, yeah, you've got to win this by 10 points, I think. Right. Well, I guess before you weigh in on that, Becky, I guess like it seems like it feels like we have to have a,

I don't know about a landslide, but a very significant victory for this not to be a problem. And the idea of that being, true seems like a huge problem in itself, right? Like, that's not, that's not, that shouldn't be true, but it is true, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, we live under minority rule where they even elect the Democrat president of the United States, we have to have a super majority of the votes, right? And those of us who work in elections, we talk about, you know, what we need to win on election day isn't 50% plus one vote. We need to make sure that like the margin of error, you know what I mean,

is like the margin of victory is larger than the margin of fuckery and error, right? There's like incompetence and then there's, you know what I mean, actual cheating. And we could win by a margin that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's greater than that. And, you know, I think Mark what to bring up about the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, right, that happened in Palm Beach, you know, county. And in Florida in 2000, like, they sent a busload of Republican staffers down to disrupt and stop the vote, you know what I mean, in one really important county.

And look, you know, we remember the Brooks Brothers. I don't think we're ready for the proud boys version of the Brooks Brothers riot, not just in county, but in every contested county, right? They could unleash like a crazy amount of disruption, which is why, you know, people like us need to understand the process. We need to not be in shock and disarray, but we need to understand what's going on where we can't apply pressure if they decide to feel this, you know, understand that the process itself is flawed and easily gained if we let our guard down.

We have to fight really hard because, you know, Republicans show they're willing to fight really hard and they're willing to violate norms and precedent to get what they want. And we've too often sort of been sitting back as Democrats as being super polite and say like, hey, that's not how this is supposed to go. You know, meanwhile, they're just, you know, eating our lunch.

Go ahead, Martin. Oh, Brett Kavanaugh was in the Brook Brothers riots. He was one of those Republican operators. who took over a polling facility and he got rewarded with the Supreme Court seat. Yeah, Amy, Tony Bright was on the legal team for George W. Bush in 2000. You know what I mean?

That was part of securing that. Now she's going to be on the Supreme Court. So it is really time, you know, to play a hardball. And I think, too, like, you know, a lot of times in these, in these, you know, like national dendocrats, they're just not used to fighting. Some of them are, to be honest, too old.

They just don't have the, they don't have the energy for it. and they want things to be the way it used to be. And then also for a lot of the people that are in charge of the party, same stuff's not at stake. You know what I mean, as it is for a lot of folks, right, who haven't been getting unemployment. You know what I mean? They are really making, haven't made choices about what they can,

when they can, you know, how many times they can feed their family. And there's a lot of people who, you know what I mean, still going to buy that boat this summer. You know what I mean? No matter who can be the president. And it's just not the same for them. I think sometimes they just don't fight hard enough. I remember right after the loss in 2016, there was a big meeting at the DMC and like an all hands thing.

And the young people were screaming at the people who run the party about how they didn't get it. And I remember this quote just stuck with me since then was like, you don't get it. You're going to get the die of old age. You know? And it's just like, we're going to die of climate change. The wars are caused by climate change or fascism or whatever. It's like it's not like the stakes are so totally different by 401Ks versus. versus getting to die naturally in your sleep,

like we all dream to, you know? Yeah, I mean, look, you know, like I live in California, and I've already gotten so much less, like Diane Feinstein, you know what I mean, is my senator, like I'm, like people in Wyoming have two senators, who are over them, you know, like one 40th of the representation.

You know, we already have, you know, a problem with representation and it's kind of popular representation being able to influence, you know, our federal government. And so we're gonna have to draw a line, We're going to draw the line somewhere, and I think this is, I think Trump trying to, like, actually to lose the popular vote and lose the electoral college, but trying to steal the election. I think this is where we need to draw the line and where we need to pitch the ballot.

Well, okay, on that last thing I'm going to ask, and I put you on the spot here. But a couple things. First of all, you know, take the time to give people any plugs, anything you think it's important that they know about. Throw that out there. But my last question is, gun to your head. what do you think is actually going to happen where all this is concerned when the dust settles? Well, I think at the end of the day, you know, we're lining out for a very large turnout for Joe Biden, right? It's looking good, but we're also seeing in places like Florida and Texas, we're seeing, you know, Republicans are motivated to vote to. So I think we are not going to know who won Pennsylvania on election night.

and I think we have to be, you know, really ready. If we win in places like Ohio to say, of course we win, of course we won Pennsylvania, right? Just because Pennsylvania can't start kind of votes, Ohio can. If we win in Ohio, we know we won in Pennsylvania. And I think if we get out there and set the narrative, that this thing can all be over. So I'm cautiously optimistic, but what I do know is that, you know, we need to be prepared to fight because we don't win when we don't fight. And, you know, like your list should go to check out the countguide.com, the count

guide.com to find like a document that's written for regular folks and local elected officials that just explain how this process works, what you can do if you're an elected official, what you can do if you're a regular person, what you can do if you're in a swing state, what you can do if you're not in a swing state. Because we need to be psychologically prepared. If we win outright on election day, stand back. We'll go home. But if we know, we've got to be ready on November 4, not to wait around.

maybe be a little hungover, but by afternoon, you've got to be back in the game. Right, right. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you very much, Becky, for joining us. We really appreciate it. And, you know, just fingers crossed that the worst doesn't happen. I don't know what else to say, but thank you for illuminating some of it for us. Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for talking about this stuff. People need to know. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody. Okay. Well, yeah, like I said, the first half of the first half of the time,

that I found terrifying then you know there's some hope at the end of it I just can't like again to me it's related to the shit we're talking about with Lindsey Graham earlier in the Senate committee like they just they do whatever they want to do you know

and there are opportunities here for some bullshit to go down and given their track record it just I don't know man the shit scares me the shit fucking scares me yeah I mean I'm on the record I think it's going to be fine.

I know, which is weird, by the way. If anybody's been, like, keeping up with our show for a while, they'll know that that is typically the inverse of where we stand on things. Like, really, I should take that as the ultimate soothing influence, the fact that Smart Mark himself thinks it's going to be fine, because I feel like typically you're the one who's like, no, you don't understand how shitty this is, Trey. No.

Things are worse than you think. and here's why. I mean, like, look, I'm not saying life's going to go perfect. I'm just saying,

like, it feels like people are just exhausted and fed up with this bullshit. And, um, if you believe any of the projections, the most likely outcome is Biden wins, like close to 400 electoral votes.

Like, like the odds of Trump winning are roughly equal to Biden winning 400 electoral votes. Like it's not like a remotely uneven contest. And I just like, the, like, where she was saying that,

like people could go like federal true um law enforcement could go seize ballots so i'm thinking like well what agency because the post office is its own cops right they're the ones who invested joe uh stevenan ban on the boat remember um yeah that would it's tends to be the fbias job i thought ballots are fraudulent but chris ray they're already geared up to fire him as soon as the election's over because he's not told the party line about investigating hunter biden and and try and and and joe announcing investigations with them it's like i just don't think people are going to i think there's too much integrity is the wrong word but there's people down the down the chain of command

who aren't protected legally if this shit doesn't go wrong trump's not going to prison the matter what happens uh but uh if this if this attempted half-ass coup at the post office doesn't work some guy who's a post office cop's not like i'm gonna lose my pension and go to prison over this shit nah not doing it's not doing it right you know well i mean you know i hope you're right buddy uh and for everybody listening normally yes we'd be uh looking at the comments and everything right now but just so you know those have still never shown up on my screen so we we broadcast live on facebook and youtube and periscope in a bunch of places at once in order to do that i use a multi-streaming platform and that's where

i'm at it's supposed to take all of your comments and funnel them into what i'm looking at so i can see comments from all the different platforms. For some reason, tonight, it is not working. So I can't see any comments right now. And thus, I can't go to any of them. And for that, I apologize. So I don't know what else to do,

but just keep bullshit with Mark for a minute, which I have something to bring up. You're talking about the young people saying, you know, like, look, you don't understand. You get to die in your sleep, motherfucker, right? Tuesday of this week, before we did, before we did the skews on Tuesday earlier that day, I did a thing that Vanderbilt University put together. It was a like a get out the vote, a virtual get out the vote event for college students. And the whole premise of it was like why should college students vote?

And there was a whole thing where they allowed the college students who were participating to ask questions of the panelists or whatever. of which I was one. And a lot of them had questions like, what am I supposed to say to my peers who just, who feel like it doesn't matter. All these people are going to fuck us over anyway. And, you know,

and our voice doesn't matter, whatever, especially, you know, and again, it's heck this event with the people who could actually ask questions were students at Vanderbilt, which is in Tennessee. So they're like, you know, we're in a red state.

None of this shit matters. And my old thing the whole time was like, well, yeah, I mean, like, you're not wrong about that, but that's exactly why you should, like, your own question is the motivation for why you should go and vote, right? Um, but it doesn't seem to play out that way because you can just look at the numbers and they don't, like, young people don't, they don't vote like, like other groups do, like old people do. Like, all this shit we're saying is true, but they don't, they don't. don't get out there and actually do it and i'm not trying to like chastise them right now that's not what i'm trying to do i'm just saying like i think they are right about how they feel about it but the only way to fix it is for them to become engaged at the level they should be and that doesn't happen it's like um yeah i mean uh i remember sitting in uh meetings i work for the newspaper about

where like how to be young people to read the local newspaper and i was like 22 23 at the time and i'd raise my hand like you're not gonna because they don't pay pro property taxes they don't have a kid in the school district they don't have a stake in this shit like like like like like you guys do so they're just like there's no like pivoting to putting like you know Taylor swift on the front page isn't a fix my man it just isn't so like that's part of it but also the if anybody actually wants to hear the answer like about why you should vote when no one perfect is like one thing you learn in adulthood is like um most of what you're doing in life is kicking the can down the road, right? You're just trying to push stuff off until a solution presents itself. We're trying

to make things mildly better. I mean, like, you and I grew up poor white trash. You put some duct tape on it. Duck tape's not a permanent solution. We know that, but you got to get the muffler back on the car, you know? Right. Right. I don't, I can't promise you things will get better later, but I promise you they can get worse now. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. And yeah, and that's one of the arguments I made too on the thing. I was like, look, I know everybody looks at this year and how shitty it is and it's easy to take everything together

and just in your mind think, oh my God, what a fucking catastrophe of a year 2020 is, but none of that shit is like coincidental. Like, this is what happens after four years of the leadership that we have

had, especially when something, some major adversity arises like a new pandemic or whatever. Like it's not, it's not just some shit that's happening to us. It's happening for a reason, you know,

and like you said, it could get worse. It could absolutely get worse. You take 2020's bad, 2024 has got some shit in store for you. I guarantee you if things don't change. I mean, a lot of stuff's happening right now is just like a dresser risk for climate change.

Like talking about like a micro crisis coming up to the south. The economic problems related inequality and a lot of places can get clean drinking water and you can't get public buy-in for like systemic chain or like collective action, soft collection action problems. Like the pandemic itself, man, like the way we get our food is designed to manufacture pandemics, the way factory farming happens for these diseases to jump from animals to people. And so, like, there are fairly minor and medium-sized tweaks we can make to how we do international supply chains, factory farming. They would make pandemics less likely, but they can't do it if you don't have a government interested in finding solutions. So get out there and vote. All right. Well, let's end a little bit early because in five minutes, the debate starts.

So we're going to end right here, and we will see you guys next Tuesday. And, you know, who knows what will have happened. But whatever it is, we'll cover. Rick on the skews. Thank y'all. See you love you. Bye.